Fallout: The Lost Memories
by Mr Mythos
Summary: FALLOUT! But in England! Based on what it'd be like if I was in Fallout. It's not like all the other "Girl get's transported to blah-de-blah" land. I know Some of he stuff may not fit in with the Fallout lore, but hey, what the hell?


**Disclaimer: **I do not own Interplay, well, Bethesda does now, but anyway, I do not own The Fallout Series.

**Claimer: **I _do_, however, own all the characters in this story, especially the main character, as that character is me.

**Fallout: The United Kingdom**

**Chapter One: Guard Duty**

The clock built into my PIPboy 3000 flashed a few times before the small clock flickered. The illuminated green numbers now read **6:00**. The small beeping noise awoke me from my dreams with a start. I opened my eyes. The walls of my room were rusty and dull-coloured, as always, and the annoyingly familiar drip of the leak in the ceiling returned like a monotonous march upon my eardrums. I sighed, wondering if it was worth the bloody effort to heave my arse out of bed. After a few moments, I decided it was, as it was slop day, and the Overseer wouldn't be too happy if I got up late.

I sat up and pulled on my glasses. Suddenly everything was much clearer. The small creeping rust on the walls becoming more than copper blur on the grey wall and the obscure shapes scattered around the room became a chair, a small table, a larger table, and the keypad beside the door. I scratched my chin absently as I heard other people scuffling around, even the distant beeping of another PIPboy. I stood up and stretched, feeling the strain and satisfying movement of muscles in my arms and shoulders. I strode over to the larger table, where my grey jumpsuit with the words "VAULT 222" rested. I frowned and clicked my tongue as I examined the suit closer as I picked it up: the letters were peeling and cracked. I would need a new one soon.

I pulled it on with effort. It was becoming small for me too. I stretched quickly again, then snatched up my PIPboy from the bedside table. I pulled it on, clipping the straps tightly to my wrists. I examined my small portable computer. It was scratched, and old. There were chips found on nearly every inch of the thing. I frowned again, then lowered my wrist to my side and walked over to the keypad by the door. All doors shut at 10:00, and only Vault-dwellers with special access were allowed to roam the corridors beyond that point.

I typed quickly. A skill I had acquired before the wipe-out had happened. I watched as the familiar green writing scrawled across the screen. I waited for it to all appear, and then I filled in the criteria.

Name: Jack Edwards

Rank: Dweller

These were the only things you told the databanks. Then the keypad sent the information off to confirm you existed and that you weren't an intruder. I didn't really understand why we had to fill this in every morning, since I highly doubted any raiders who managed to actually get inside our Vault would end up locking themselves in a room by accident and then have to pretend to be one of us.

Life had been lucky for me, I thought as I moved down the corridor after the door had opened and I had left my quarters and began to make my way to the main areas. All my family had died when the explosions had gone off. I had only survived because I was already inside the vault when the first shot aimed at our country hit. I had been only twelve at the time, and things had been hard. But now I am three years ahead of that. Three years. I have been in Vault 222 for three sodding years, doing the same sodding thing, and frankly, I'm quite bored of it.

I looked over the side of the railings on the side of a large suspension bridge. Below was a huge plaza, where a few people were moving about. Not everyone got up this early. The women and elderly stay in until about eleven' o'clock. I looked up now. Rows upon rows upon rows of rooms lie above me. Corridors leading off to millions upon millions of quarters. Some of my friends made it too. My friend William Marshal lives, although he was disfigured in the blast. He wears a special hazard suit now; mainly because of the fact he goes on guard duty every day, but also to hide the disfigurement of his face. Another friend of mine, Rebecca Cooke is still up there somewhere, but I haven't seen her since 

we first went into the Vaults. I'm sure many other people I knew from my childhood are still up there, but the chances are I'll never see them.

I slowly make my descent towards the large doors leading to the schooling holes, the food cantina, and the hospitals. There are other people about, few of them I recognise, going about their business, not worrying about what is happening above, what the ways of the surface world are. I look up again, to see more doors opening. People emerging from their quarters, looking down. I think I can see a small child trying to spit over the side, but his mother is scolding him. I smiled. I tried to do that when I was first here, when the people were building this place.

As the red lights emanating from the bulbs on the ceiling above the door to the cantina flickered every few minutes above my head, a voice called me from behind. I turned slowly. A figure wearing a leather suit hefting a firearm of some sort approached me. It was hard to tell who the guard were under those suits, but I knew it was Will. I smiled faintly as he got close to me. The mask was always the thing that made me think. They looked like gas masks, but fleshed out. There was a long line of black tinted plastic to see from, and those strange chambers that filtered out gas. In this case, they filtered radiation, and allowed the guard to breathe when a radiation storm passed.

"Edwards, you're on duty tonight. With me," his voice was muffled by the mask, and gruffer and deeper than it had been three years ago, but I still recognised it.

"Don't call me by my second name," I told him, still smiling slightly "but why am I going on watch duty with you?" my smile faded. What could Captain Poulson want me to be on duty for?

"I don't know. Orders are orders, you know that," he paused, then leaned in closer "and try not to ask too many questions, or get in over your head."

I frowned and turned away to enter the cantina.

The all-too-familiar smell of processed food met my nostrils like an old friend at a reunion that has really let themselves go. I had always hated that smell. The smell of industry. I looked to the large tanks on a unit on the right side of the small serving area. It wasn't very big, just a serving counter littered with flyers and discarded plates the head "chef," Helga couldn't be bothered to clean up, a large multi-purpose oven for when we occasionally had solid meals, and the tanks filled with slop.

I slopped on Tuesdays and Thursdays. It was disgusting, watching a person shuffle forward, holding out their plate, looking immensely bored, or staring at you as if you were a slug. Then you'd scoop a small amount of goop onto their paper recyclable plates. Then Helga would put leftovers into one of the tanks, where it was cleansed and put into the other tank, then I scooped some out of the bowl the slop fell into and the cycle restarted.

"Edvards!" screeched Helga's voice, like a javelin to the ear "Where have you bin?" her voice was sharp and short, but loud and drilling at the same time. It was like meeting a midget with long legs. But then again, I supposed that there was a mutant somewhere that looked like that. But then again, I thought, turning back to Helga, no mutant could compare to the ugliness of Helga Von Trepe. A woman built like a brick privy and with the same manners and social upbringing. Anyone smaller than her was a rope, in the sense that she could pull you until you broke. Usually within the space of five minutes. But three long, hard years of coping with Helga had taught me some resistance and survival skills. Don't make eye contact whilst working. Refrain all speech to "Yes, Helga," "No, Helga," or "I don't know, Helga." It was tough, but a day with her certainly did make life seem a little less dull when you finally left the horrid smell and the horrid person.

"Sorry, Helga," I mumbled, shuffling over to the hanger where my apron hung upon its rusty hook. I pulled it off and over my head. I didn't understand why we had to wear aprons. We wore jumpsuits; they could be cleaned if we spilt food on them. Maybe it was to give the illusion that something of our former world still remained. That we still had some resilience in a world of madness. I shook my head and turned to the counter, Ignoring Helga's glare. I'd heard of penetrating stares in books, but the look Helga gave you really did penetrate you. You could see it, even though you weren't looking at her, it was like having someone standing right behind you and staring at the back of your head. Knowing those cold, black, empty eyes were looking at you, searching every inch of you for some sort of problem or difference, daring you to even wipe your nose. But now I could see people were filing in through the entrance doors, shuffling in as if life had lost all meaning, staring at the floor, eyes half 

open. It was almost sadistic, being kept in the Vaults. We were given no freedom, we got up, we did the same thing, we went back to sleep. We did this our whole lives, and then we died. Nothing special, pointless, just keeping the human race going in the hopes civilisation would one day be recovered. But this was fruitless, stupid, and even to believe that Vaults were our saviour was mental. The Vaults weren't our saviour. They were cages. Cages that had been repainted and had the air freshened to make it seem like it was a home, but beneath the cheap crap used to trick the average Joe into thinking "hey, this place ain't half bad..." there was still a cage.

The first person shuffled up; a middle-aged man, his entire figure emanating the word monotonous. He sighed, and I scooped out a small portion of goop and dropped it on his plate with a boring _plop._ I sighed, sounding almost as pathetic as the man, who had now moved on to sit down in the far corner of the room. It was going to be a long day...

I flopped down on my bed. It was cold, and hard, but at least it was a freedom from today's boredom. I had spent the entire day slopping. Jenkins was sick, so I had to take over for him. That meant dealing with all his duties, which involved working double time when Helga took her break. I closed my eyes. I wondered what life was like up there, on the surface. No. Life up there was horrible, worse than this. Mutant gangs and thugs roamed what was left of the United Kingdom, and people who managed to scrape a living up there who _weren't _mutants had to deal with all the stuff that went on up there. No, What the Overseer said was right: we were far better off in our Vaults, our cages. As I lay there for a while, I was glad I had nothing to do that evening, so I could sleep. But then I remembered; Will had said I had guard duty with him, didn't he? I sat up suddenly, throwing a curse word at the blank metal wall across the room. I jumped off my bed and leapt over to the keypad. My fingers skittered across it, typing in my information as they moved. I needed to hurry: I was late.

I hurtled down the corridor, the padded feet of my jumpsuit making no noise as I ran. I passed a man with short brown hair, who scowled at me as I rushed past, almost bowling him over. It was strange, running in the Vaults. There was no wind, so you moved quite quickly. I moved quickly across a suspension bridge, my feet digging into the patterns on it. Stairs came into view. Metal stairs, which I could slip on, but if I moved slowly, I would lose time. I scrambled up the stairs, careful to hold onto the scratched and beaten handrail placed to keep people from tumbling to their death. I turned a corner, up another flight of stairs, across another suspension bridge and into a corridor. Metal doors placed at regular intervals showed people's quarters, where some were sleeping soundly already. As I turned right again, I almost bumped headlong into Helga. She didn't move much, but I was knocked off my feet and hit the floor, hard. It didn't hurt that much, but the surprise momentarily stunned me.

"EDVARDS!" screeched Helga, her voice slicing directly into my brain like someone had stabbed me through the temple.

"Sorry, Helga..." I mumbled again, getting up and hurrying past her before she could yell at me more.

Two minutes later, I arrived, huffing and puffing, at the small door that lead to the gate of our Vault. Two guards stood either side, showing recognition of my presence as I arrived by sniffing loudly. Every breath I took was like drinking liquid fire. As if my lungs had been lined with gasoline and then someone had made me inhale a flame. I placed a hand on the wall and steadied myself, pushing my glasses further up my nose as they were falling down with sweat slipping with the rhythm of my breathing. After I had got most of my breath back, I approached one of the guards cautiously.

"Uh, I'm supposed to be doing guard duty with William Marshall tonight. Uh, Jack Edwards?"

The guard grunted, not even bothering to look at me. I frowned. He turned around and pressed some numbers on a keypad, and the door opened loudly. I looked at both guards, and received nothing in return. I slowly and cautiously stepped through the open doorway.

It closed behind me. I shivered and looked ahead; a large slanting corridor moved upwards into the distance. I shivered again. There were lights that hung from the ceilings occasionally; giving a contrast of dark and light, and making the whole passageway seem more eerie and foreboding. I took one step forward. I hadn't been to the surface in three years. I hadn't seen the wreckage. Some people had gone insane from the things they saw, and were shipped off to asylums above. I took another step. Was that something there, in the shadow of the poor lights? I shook my head and forced my legs to 

move at a more suitable pace. I thought of Will, and how cross he would be when he found out I was late. I moved a little faster. The end of this long passage didn't seem to get any closer. Was that a figure at the end, maybe a guard? I slowly began to draw closer to the person. As I did, I saw the features of a hazard suit, and weaponry. When I finally got within speaking range, the person called out

"You're late," it was Will. I sighed a sigh of relief. I was always edgy around guards, they always looked at you like you were doing something wrong.


End file.
